3 Great Sources for Gathering Competitive Intelligence

The Hollywood version of gathering competitive intelligence might show some phone tapping, computer hacking, or night-time activities involving flashlights. Illegal! Fortunately, plenty of competitive intelligence is freely available, and you don't need to break a sweat over the methods.

Here are some great (and legal) sources of information to consider as you build a competitive analysis:

When it comes to internal sources, think big and target everyone within your organization. Why? Because your co-workers are already doing competitive intelligence as they perform their jobs on a daily basis. A big part of doing CI consists of formalizing these activities and building a system around them so that you're constantly mining information from these sources, analyzing it, and getting it to the decision makers who need it to formulate future strategies.